Posterous Cofounder Garry Tan Steps Down, Heads To Y Combinator

Jason Kincaid

Jason Kincaid worked as a writer for TechCrunch from April 2008 through 2012. He grew up in Danville, California and later relocated to UCLA in Los Angeles, California, where he studied biology with a minor in ‘Society and Genetics’. You can reach him at jkincaid@gmail.com → Learn More

Friday, January 14th, 2011

Garry Tan, one of the cofounders of easy-to-use blogging service Posterous, is moving on from the company. Tan will be leaving to take a position at Y Combinator, where he will serve as a designer in residence. Posterous doesn’t put much weight on titles, but Tan had a hand in the site’s engineering, design, and product development.

Posterous isn’t taking off as quickly as its competitor Tumblr, but it has a solid audience and has recently released a neat Groups feature. Tan didn’t elaborate much on his reasons for leaving, but says that it boils down to wanting to work with smaller teams, which he’ll be able to do at Y Combinator (Posterous is now at around 13 employees). He also added that Posterous is going “gangbusters” and that he expects 2011 to be “really phenomenal”.

Posterous has raised over $5 million, including Y Combinator funding and a Series A round in March 2010.

Here’s Tan’s post announcing the news on his Posterous blog:

Just as Posterous has prospered, grown and changed, so to is it time for me to evolve my role. Effective today, I’m ending my day-to-day development with Posterous and moving into an advisory role. Though my day-to-day may change, my faith in the team and the product is unchanged and unwavering. Posterous is in good hands and on the right track to fulfilling its potential. I am proud of what we’ve built together and look forward to the future with anticipation to see where the team and you, the users, take this very special community.

My greatest passions lie with the early stage of building world-changing consumer products. To that end, I’ve decided to join the team at Y Combinator as a designer-in-residence and help the dozens of top pre-seed startups in the newest Winter 2011 batch reach their potential through excellent user experience.

I am greatly thankful to our team, investors and most of all our users for all the amazing work and adventures. Thanks for all of your support.

Company: Posterous
Website: posterous.com
Launch Date: May 2008
Funding: $10.1M

Posterous emerged from Y Combinator in the summer of 2008 as an innovative company focused on making blogging simple - as simple as sending an email - and now has more than 15 million monthly users. With the launch of Posterous Spaces, the company is bringing its trademark simplicity to help people share smarter with intuitive privacy controls to share selectively across multiple platforms.

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